Paige Patterson labels ‘weak’ states out of step with conservative SBC

HOUSTON (ABP) — Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia are four “weak” states that have not yet fallen into line with the Southern Baptist’s new conservative leadership, according to seminary president Paige Patterson.

Even in those states, however, “time is on the side” of conservatives as reforms instituted by national leaders trickle down to influence grass-roots participation in denominational affairs, he said.

Patterson, an architect of the SBC’s conservative juggernaut, assessed the state of the SBC in an interview published in the July issue of Texas Baptist, a newspaper edited by conservative leader Walter Carpenter of Houston. Carpenter also is a trustee of the 15 million-member convention’s Home Mission Board.

Baptists in states such as Oklahoma, Arkansas, Ohio, Florida and Georgia “realize better than most that their future is with the Foreign Mission Board, the Home Mission Board and the seminaries over and above what is going on in each particular state,” Patterson said.

Those states are in contrast to others “that have not come to this realization,” he continued. Asked by Carpenter if he was speaking primarily of Texas, North Carolina and Virginia, Patterson replied: “Those and Kentucky are our four weakest states.”

Patterson, since 1992 the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., is credited— along with Texas appeals-court judge Paul Pressler—with launching the movement in 1979 that elected a string of conservative SBC presidents and steered the convention’s agencies and institutions sharply to the right.

Today, “time is on the side of the SBC,” even in the problem states, Patterson mused. The state conventions he described as “not in harmony with the SBC” are “primarily aging state conventions,” he said.

In states such as Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina and Virginia, the Baptist churches that are growing and influential “are not involved with the state convention, and they are committed to what’s going on in the Southern Baptist Convention,” Patterson said.

These state conventions face a situation they have “no opportunity of winning,” he added. “Eventually they will have to decide whether they are going to decline perceptively or whether they want to be a part of the overall program and grow.”

The four state conventions mentioned by Patterson sent a combined $40.1 million to the SBC in 1993-94 through the Cooperative Program. That amounted to 28 percent of the total $142 million the SBC received through the unified giving plan.

Yet moderate Baptists in those states have blocked several attempts to bring the state conventions in line with national conservative reforms.

In response to another question, Patterson blamed the historical influence of Southeastern Seminary for “liberal [Baptist] bureaucracies” in states like North Carolina and Virginia. “It’s also a cause of the crippling of the churches,” Patterson said.

The fact that many Mid-Atlantic churches do not conduct services on Sunday night is not in itself an indication of liberalism, Patterson said, but it is sort of an indication for the lack of vitality in many of the churches on the East Coast. The seminary has contributed to that largely, and it is the reason why 80-82 percent of our churches are either plateaued or declining.”

Three of the four states named by Patterson have an SBC seminary within their borders. Patterson predicted changes at the seminaries will reduce moderate influence at a grass-roots level.

The election of conservative leader Mark Coppenger as president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo., “will have a good effect on that part of the country,” he predicted. Similarly, Albert Mohler’s leadership at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., “will mean that they recover their evangelical emphasis there.”

Also, Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, under the leadership of conservative Ken Hemphill, “will gradually have an effect on Texas,” he said. Hemphill was elected last year, after trustees fired the previous president, Russell Dilday, over his moderate leanings.

Elsewhere in the question-and-answer interview, Patterson praised Mohler and declared that “the worst of the problems” at Southern Seminary are over. “Al Mohler has the brains of Erasmus and the courage of Luther,” he said.

(Erasmus was a 16th century Dutch scholar noted for his pioneer publication of the Greek New Testament. Martin Luther, a German, is regarded as founder of the Protestant Reformation.)

Among Patterson’s other observations in the four-page interview:

—Conservatives in Texas “could learn something from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship,” he said. “In Texas I would have a very strong conservative fellowship. I probably would not start a separate state convention at this time because time is on your side.”

—The SBC’s embracing of the biblical inerrantist position should settle any debate on social issues such as abortion and homosexuality, Patterson said. “Once you agree the Scripture is the inerrant word of God, then your position on issues like these is settled. I have great difficulty on seeing how one could support pornography or the taking of innocent life through abortion.”

—Seminary professors should not be tenured, Patterson said. He noted he is the last faculty member at Southeastern to be granted tenure and that he “probably will renounce that tenure at some future point.”

“What tenure has amounted to across the years has been, in the final analysis, a fortress to protect professors so that they can peddle anything they want to peddle or be as incompetent as they happen to be and still be protected in their jobs. I view that as far more like socialism than capitalism. It is no accident that the remaining bastions of socialism in America are in the universities,” Patterson said.

August/September 1995